Is the Archbishop of Canterbury stupid?

The Archbishop of Canterbury (think: Anglican pope) caused a stir with recent comments about Sharia law in England. The BBC's headline: "Sharia law in UK is 'unavoidable'." But here is what he actually said:

[T]here is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with some kinds of aspects of other religious law.

The same happened two months ago in an interview about Christmas. The Telegraph gave us "Archbishop says nativity 'a legend'." But here's what he actually said:

Well Matthew's gospel doesn't tell us that there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from, it says they're astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire. That's all we're really told so, yes, 'the three kings with the one from Africa' - that's legend; it works quite well as legend.

Whenever this happens, the general sentiment around the office here is, "What was he thinking?!" It blows people's minds. "Is the Archbishop of Canterbury really that naive?"

I think the answer is yes, but he is not naive about Sharia or Christmas. He is a brilliant thinker, but from what I can tell he is naive about leadership.

Here is the tension: The world is big and complex, but understanding complexity takes a lot of time, energy, and intelligence. To cope we deal in over-simplifications—abstractions!—but that means that we're never actually communicating with each other. Faster communication technology doesn't solve the problem because we're still lazy and dumb, so we use the increased efficiency to simply increase the amount of communication rather than the quality of communication.

It's a fundamental friction in the scaling of our civilization that will ultimately contribute to our doom: we are too frantic, lazy, and dumb to truly communicate.

The practical upshot for leadership is that you can either be smart and sound stupid to most everyone, or be stupid and sound smart to people that agree with you. Ack. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.